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Virginia, a State in Flux, Is Also a State in Play

Audrey Britt, a volunteer in Richmond, Va., making calls for the Obama re-election campaign.Credit
Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

RICHMOND, Va. — With President Obama due here on Saturday, Aida Pacheco and Providencia Santiago were musing on the life expectancy of their Obama campaign signs in their solidly Republican, mostly white neighborhoods just outside this city.

“In 2008, my husband and I kept putting them up, and people kept taking them down when we weren’t looking,” said Mrs. Santiago, shaking her head as she brought up the memory on Thursday.

Despite such sentiments, Mr. Obama won the state, the first time a Democrat had taken Virginia’s electoral votes since Lyndon B. Johnson — a victory built on the strength of gains he made in Richmond, along with strong turnout in more liberal Northern Virginia. But if the president is to repeat that feat, political analysts say he will have to prove there is life for a Democrat outside of the blue bastion of Northern Virginia, and extend his 2008 inroads in the rapidly growing suburbs deep in the more traditionally Southern parts of the state.

It is irrefutable that the Obama campaign desperately wants to reprise its Virginia victory of four years ago. The state has only 13 electoral votes, but pathways to Mr. Obama’s re-election get much steeper if the commonwealth is taken out of the blue column. With Virginia, Mr. Obama can lose Ohio and still win re-election. With Virginia, he can lose Florida and still win re-election. With Virginia, he can even lose both of those once must-have states — and he can still win re-election. Conversely, barring a major shift, it is very difficult to see how his rival Mitt Romney can win the White House if he does not win Virginia; he would have to pick up Democratic-leaning states like Michigan or Pennsylvania.

Though a Washington Post poll this week gave Mr. Obama a seven-point advantage over Mr. Romney in Virginia, the difference is within the poll’s four percentage-point margin of sampling error for each candidate, and politicians on both sides of the aisle maintained the state is very much in play.

“When the Obama campaign made a presentation and said Virginia is one of the most important states, on one level, I thought, ‘Great, we’re not used to this kind of attention,’ ” said Senator Mark Warner, Democrat of Virginia. “But I do think that while the current polling is good, it will still be a tossup.”

On Saturday, Mr. Obama will kick off his re-election campaign with a rally at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he will try to tap into the city’s obsession with the V.C.U. basketball team by enlisting Coach Shaka Smart to serve as master of ceremonies for the warm-up program. (Richmond loves Mr. Smart. You can’t go two blocks in this city without seeing a sign with a play on his name, like “Smart Move Shaka.”)

Saturday’s rally will be Mr. Obama’s umpteenth visit to the state just across the Potomac; since he entered the White House, his schedulers have appeared keenly aware of how crucial Old Dominion will be to the president’s re-election. He has made roughly 40 nonroutine visits to Virginia, compared with about two dozen to Maryland, his neighbor to the north, not counting takeoffs, landings and golf games at Andrews Air Force Base.

If the president needs to go to a nearby community college to showcase an education initiative, he picks Northern Virginia Community College, in Annandale. On Friday he went to nearby Washington-Lee High School in Arlington to discuss higher education costs. Need somewhere to take a visiting head of state from Russia? Ray’s Hell Burger in Arlington. How about somewhere to take the girls for ice cream? The Dairy Godmother in Alexandria’s Del Ray neighborhood. Christmas shopping? There’s the Best Buy on Jefferson Davis Highway in Alexandria. The Obama campaign already has 13 field offices in the state, and is planning to open two more next week.

Mr. Romney, meanwhile, is hardly conceding the state. He was in Virginia twice this past week, doing an event on women’s issues in Chantilly on Wednesday before heading on Thursday to Portsmouth, where he promised at a rally that he would permit drilling for gas and oil off Virginia’s coast and would expand the military, including the Navy fleet.

“2008 was a crazy turnout, and the Obama team did do a good job in energizing young voters and minority voters, but the question becomes, this year is there going to be that excitement factor for the president?” said Jerry Kilgore, the former state attorney general who was chairman of Senator John McCain’s Virginia campaign in 2008. “It can’t be.”

Mr. Kilgore said that for all the influx of new Democratic voters in the state, “at the end of the day, this state breaks Republican.”

“Bob Dole even won Virginia” during his 31-state drubbing by President Bill Clinton in 1996, Mr. Kilgore added.

During the 2010 midterm elections, Virginia returned to its traditional red hue as Republicans won three House seats from Democrats after taking back the governorship in 2009. But operatives with both parties acknowledge that a presidential election year is a whole different ballgame, since the young people, members of minority groups and Hispanic voters that Mr. Obama is depending on to recapture the state did not really show up at the polls in 2010.

Besides drumming up turnout in Northern Virginia, a big part of the Obama strategy relies on plugging into the growing number of newcomers in suburban areas in the rest of the state, in communities not known as Democratic strongholds in the past. That means such places as around Norfolk, where a growing number of transplants from the north have moved in, lured by the naval base, and Charlottesville, where new arrivals have sought out the genteel intellectual atmosphere around the University of Virginia and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. And it means the fast-growing suburbs around Richmond, where a big influx of Hispanics like Mrs. Santiago and Mrs. Pacheco have arrived over the past two decades. The Hispanic population in the Richmond area is now around 40,000, up from almost nothing 20 years ago.

When Mrs. Pacheco, who is second-generation Puerto Rican, first moved to Mechanicsville, outside Richmond, in 1989, from Trenton, there were virtually no Latinos in the area, she said. “You’d go into the supermarket, and there were no Goya products, not one,” she said.

Things are different today. The south side of Richmond has several Latino food stores, and nearby Chesterfield has a substantial Hispanic population. There is now a Latino soccer league in the area with about 1,000 participants. Telemundo has a Richmond office. All these reasons, Mrs. Pacheco said, will contribute to Mr. Obama’s numbers in November.

But she said she would not be at Mr. Obama’s rally Saturday because she had other plans: staffing an Obama table at the Que Pasa Latino festival on Richmond’s Canal Walk, where 8,000 to 10,000 people were expected.

Correction: May 8, 2012

An article on Saturday about the strategic importance of Virginia in President Obama’s re-election campaign misstated the year in which Republicans regained the state’s governorship. It was in 2009, not in the midterm election of 2010. (The party won back three House seats that year). The article also misidentified the location of a Best Buy store in northern Virginia where President Obama went Christmas shopping last year. It is Alexandria, not Arlington. And because of an editing error, the article misstated the name of a high school where Mr. Obama spoke on Friday. It is Washington-Lee High School, not Washington and Lee.

A version of this article appears in print on May 5, 2012, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: Virginia, a State in Flux, Is Also a State in Play. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe